Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Online anonymity is dead! Long live online anonymity!

At
ORF-FICCI's "Cyfy2013" - The India Conference on Cybersecurity and
Cyber Governance -questions over online anonymity came to the forefront
when Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Manish Tewari, made a
statement that "online anonymity should come with accountability ," and
called for a common set of global rules of engagement to further
Internet policy. In India, the government is grappling with increasing
vitriol over social media and the spreading of dangerous rumors by
unidentified persons over the internet. This begs the question - what
can (and should) be done about this global phenomenon?

The
curious case for online anonymity (and the privacy that follows) is that
it is almost technically impossible to achieve despite the highly
encrypted Tor network and the cypherpunks who work tirelessly to ensure
such an anonymous system exists online. The recent arrest of Dread
Pirate Robert, aka Ross William Ulbricht, the owner of underground drug
trafficking site Silk Route has suggested that even if National Security
Agency of the United States is seemingly unable to break through the
Tor encryption, it is only a matter of time before the cracks show. In
an amazing account of how the arrest was made ,it appears that the NSA
tirelessly leafed through forums and social media accounts, looking for
the first mention of Silk Route to start identifying suspects, when it
was clear that they were unable to successfully trace any illicit
transactions back to Ulbricht.

Despite Silk Route's libertarian
philosophy of a truly free market unencumbered by any laws decided by
governments and other authorities, the focus of the site that saw
transactions worth $1.2 billion in little over two years was drugs and
weapons trade. This would certainly fall under what scholars like Ronald
Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski have identified as 'dark nets' - networks
on the internet we know little about and need to keep track of - those
of cyber criminals, terrorists, and private social networks among
certain diaspora that can, for example, be used for hawala scams. These
networks do end up making a strong case of the end of online anonymity
as we understand it today.

However, it must be kept in mind that
networks like Silk Route and other illegal channels have layers and
workings very different to the online anonymity that the everyday
internet user can identify with: the more talked about problem of
anonymous harassment, scams, gender abuse and cyber bullying.In a sense,
much of this is visible online anonymity that isn't hidden by
encryption as much as it is by pseudonyms. This too - trolling - as we
call it,has led to considerable debate about the nature of civil
discourse, and whether being able to hide your identity online is
encouraging crime and abuse. Social media certainly takes the lead in
this matter, with Twitter allowing users to choose any username they
wish to, but Facebook is trying to enforce a policy whereby people use
their real identities to create accounts. In fact, in the best selling
book, The Facebook Effect, journalist David Kirkpatrick explains
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's belief in "radical transparency";that
humanity would be better off if everyone was transparent and
that"having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of
integrity."

Yet the website has its fair
share of trolling, and Facebook has a mechanism in place for any
grievance redressal. In her book, Consent of the Networked , Rebecca
MacKinnon describes Facebook's "hate and harassment team" that receives
up to 2 million reports from users on any given day, asking for
perceived abusive and hateful posts to be taken down. And Facebook is
not alone feeling the burden of policing stray comments. Last year, an
American magazine, Popular Science declared that it was completing
shutting off comments (as opposed to even heavily moderating them) as it
believed that trolls were able to "skew a reader's perception of a
story, " thereby defeating the purpose of the publication. Most websites
are moving towards a signing in system for readers to create a sense of
accountability they feel anonymity does not provide.

In fact,
the global trend seems to be turning against online anonymity. In
October 2013, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the decision of a
Estonian Court, which found that a magazine, Delphi, was liable for not
being able to "protect the reputation and right of others" when it
failed to stem the tide of negative comments on a report of a particular
company's recent move that had greatly angered Estonians. While some
experts feel that the judgment was based solely on the merits of this
particular case alone; that Delphi should have anticipated hate
comments, others worry that judgments like these will affect citizens
right to free speech . A recent judgment in Canada saw a gentlemen named
Brian Burkee being awarded damages against five 'trolls' who have been
identified only by their usernames - and now will be tracked down in
real life by the authorities.

At the recent International
Governance Forum (IGF) held in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2013,
Childnet International released a survey on "Global Perspectives on
Online Anonymity ." Two-thirds of those surveyed had communicated
anonymously online in the past year. However, 70% believed that
anonymity leads to abuse, while 53% also believed that anonymity affords
people the privacy to seek help on taboo issues or contribute to
conversations more freely, without fear of being judged or identified in
real life. On balance,86% people felt that those who want to be
anonymous online, should be able to.

The fact that is that
despite its ugly avatar, online anonymity is crucial to a number of
people, including journalists, whistleblowers, victims, and political
activists. While not the only reason it was able to happen, but in part
the Arab Spring was able to take place as activists were able to
organize online without being detected and detained by authorities. As
Julian Assange writes in his book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and Future of
the Internet , "cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct
action." It is the same reason that Edward Snowden, running from the
long arm of the U.S. government has been hailed as a hero by many camps -
he has revealed the extent to which the National Security Agency in the
U.S. monitors not only its own citizens but also others around the
world. As a response to this, journalists across the spectrum are
organizing workshops to learn how to use encryption services to protect
their information and also their sources.

For
many, especially those dubbed as 'datasexuals ' by the media -- internet
users who routinely (perhaps obsessively) document their lives --
anonymity and privacy are not pressing concepts they worry about. But
there are many aspects of anonymity in the 'real world', starting right
from a secret ballot in democratic countries, which have been ingrained
in the way we function. Anonymity, then, cannot be stripped away in the
virtual world, only because it is amplified. What has happened,
however,is that the initial euphoria over the goodness and the limitless
potential of the internet is beginning to slow down. This is what
writers like Evgeny Morozov, author of 'The Net Delusion: The Dark Side
of the Internet ' and 'To Save Everything, Click Here ' warn their
readers about. Morozov feels giving 'the internet' this all-encompassing
quality that one cannot criticize its presumed inherent quality has
proven to be dangerous. He warns that the technology of the internet
must be evaluated on its individual merits, and must not lose their
historical and intellectual autonomy. For example, facial recognition
technology, exciting as it is on Facebook and other photo applications,
was developed for defense agencies and are today being used for
surveillance. In the same vein, encryption enabling projects like the
Tor project cannot be hailed as completely evil because it was used by
Silk Route,and nor can it be never questioned because some journalists
find it is the best way to protect themselves and their sources of
information.

Perhaps the best way to consider
dealing with anonymity online to give pause to the story of the group
Anonymous- a collection of global hackers who seemed to be hell bent on
playing pranks and creating chaos for big governments and big companies.
Famously, one of their pranks included taking down the Sun's front page
and replacing it with a headline that Rupert Murdoch was dead, ordering
unpaid pizzas to the Church of Scientology churches across North
America, and less lightheartedly, even hacked the CIA. At a point, up
till 2010, Anonymous seemed all-powerful and impossible to trace. They
won huge support later that year when they launched a massive DDoS
campaign against PayPal, Visa and Mastercard when those companies
refused to accept donations for Wikileaks and Julian Assange. But three
years later, many of the Anonymous hackers have been arrested. This
included an autistic teenager from Essex, a 26-year-old ex-soldier from
Doncaster, and a 16year old from south London who had also helped
Tunisian revolutionaries overcome government internet restrictions.